Language

I see what you're saying - NEC's ‘Tele Scouter’ retinal-display translation glasses

By Darren Quick

20:13 October 29, 2009 PDT

The days of a Universal Translator like the one that made chatting between alien species a non-issue in Star Trek might be some way off yet. But a new device from NEC is definitely a step in the right direction for those of us on planet Earth looking for a way to communicate with other language speakers that doesn’t involve a human translator or a well-thumbed phrase book. The prototype device called a “Tele Scouter” is a glasses type display that translates the foreign language being spoken by a partner and projects the translation onto a tiny retinal display. Read More

DEMO: Xerox 'Color By Words' uses simple language to get great pictures

By Jeff Salton

19:22 September 24, 2009 PDT

If you’re not a graphic designer, you may have struggled in the past to get your personal photos looking their best when relying on your printer’s color adjustment settings. Complex color wheels, sliders, brightness and contrast editors, and highlight tools all look handy – until you try to use them. Xerox has devised Natural Language Color Editing technology that allows you to adjust the colors in your printed documents by accessing plain English phrases. A drop-down Color By Words menu on your computer offers phrases like: ‘Make the blues a lot more vibrant’, which will then do just that across the entire document or image. Combining words can form thousands of different phrases to deliver the results you want. You can watch the demo video below or test drive the technology for yourself via the link at the end of this story. Read More

Look, no hands: the Qlocktwo from Biegert & Funk

By Paul Ridden

17:16 August 26, 2009 PDT

What's so great about numbers anyway? And why is it that the circular form seems so sought after? After all, the Qlocktwo from proves beyond reasonable doubt that it's cool to be square and words are what matter most. The familiar rounded clock face is abandoned in favor of a stylish and elegant, cornered design where illuminated letters spell out the time at set intervals. It's time-signal receiver ensures this quartz-driven timepiece is always accurate and its interchangeable faces offer numerous color coordination options. Read More

Rosetta Stone TOTALe - language learning in an online, social environment

By Karen Sprey

16:46 August 3, 2009 PDT

Rosetta Stone, the well-known language learning software that has helped millions worldwide learn a language without translation or memorization has moved into the online and Web 2.0 realm with it’s new language learning solution TOTALe. TOTALe combines three elements - the Rosetta Course, offered in 31 languages, Rosetta Studio, where you can practice with native-speaking Studio Coaches and other learners at your level in a real-time, and Rosetta World, a structured online community where you can practice and hone your language skills with native speakers and other learners at your level through fun and engaging games. Read More

Swearing proven to have a 'pain-lessening effect'

By Gizmag Team

06:34 July 27, 2009 PDT

Swearing has been around for centuries and is an almost universal human linguistic phenomenon. Now researchers have determined that swearing can have a ‘pain-lessening effect.’ Swearing taps into emotional brain centers and appears to arise in the right brain, whereas most language production occurs in the left cerebral hemisphere of the brain. The research shows one potential reason why swearing developed and why it persists. Read More

Lip-reading computers can recognize different languages

By Karen Sprey

00:51 April 28, 2009 PDT

Computerized lip-reading technology for deaf people - and surveillance cameras - has taken a step forward with scientists from the University of East Anglia successfully teaching computers to recognize different languages from the shapes and movements of people’s mouths. Read More

Rosetta Stone: taking language learning to the public

By Anne Hanrahan

22:28 April 20, 2009 PDT

The Rosetta Stone is a famous ancient Egyptian artifact discovered in 1799 that helped linguists unlock the secrets of Egyptian hieroglyphics. It's therefore an apt name for the company which has developed products designed to teach millions of people worldwide the secret of learning languages using interactive, computer based technology. Already laying claim to the title of the world's largest language software company, Rosetta Stone has now taken the plunge and gone public, the first company of its type to do so. Read More

Blind and illiterate users can outsource reading and translation with Kurzweil's kReader

By Loz Blain

00:57 January 29, 2009 PST

Ray Kurzweil is one of the most amazing intellectuals and inventors of our time. From his teenage years he's been building a long list of extraordinary achievements, from his early work teaching computers to compose music, to his world-first font-independent optical character recognition system, to his pioneering electric synthesizers that are so accurate that even musicians can't discern them from a real piano in listening tests. In 1976, blind music legend Stevie Wonder bought the first production model of the Kurzweil Reading Machine, a tabletop-sized device that was able to scan text documents and read them out using a text-to-speech engine. Last year, Kurzweil teamed up with Nokia to integrate the reading machine and its synthetic voice into the N82 mobile phone, letting blind or illiterate users read documents, menus, bills, and anything else they could capture on the phone's inbuilt camera. Now, Kurzweil has announced that the kReader phone can translate text it captures that's in another language and read it out to you in your language. It also has new text-tracking abilities to make it even easier to capture all the text on a page. Read More

Asia Online – the world’s most significant literacy project (and internet investment opportunity)

By Mike Hanlon

01:17 September 22, 2008 PDT

September 22, 2008 We’ve all dreamt of going back in history, knowing what we know now. Imagine it was the start of the internet all over again – to be able to make all the right moves because you knew how the web would be monetized, the importance of search and how to leverage it, which business models would work, and which ones wouldn’t. Asia Online appears to have manufactured itself that exact scenario in Asia with its new self-learning statistical machine translation language technologies which it is focusing on Asian languages – as the knowledge-deprived populations of Southern Asian countries adopt the internet, Asia Online looks set to play a huge role by providing information in the language of choice for the dozens of previously information-disenfranchised population groups – groups which will make up roughly half of the internet user base within four years. Viewed from another angle Asia Online’s work is about information empowerment. “Our goal here is to eliminate information poverty”, says CEO Dion Wiggins. Read More

Understanding thought: new computational modeling sheds light on how the brain works

By Kyle Sherer

21:21 June 9, 2008 PDT

Scientists at Carnegie Mellon University have developed a computational model that can predict the unique brain activation patterns associated with concrete nouns with a mean accuracy of 77 percent. Read More

RoboBraille online text translation service

By Emily Clark

00:29 May 13, 2008 PDT

May 13, 2008 Vision impaired users can now access books, news articles and web pages using an email-based service that translates text into Braille and audio recordings. RoboBraille is a free service offering a simple way of converting text without the need for users to operate complicated software and has completed more than 250,000 translations since its launch in January. Read More

Fastap keyboard certified for China

By Emily Clark

16:31 February 26, 2008 PST

February 27, 2008 Following news of a Fastap Hindi language keyboard for mobiles, Digit Wireless has announced that its input system has been certified under the Chinese text-entry standard by China’s State Language Commission. Read More

Fastap Hindi language keyboard for mobiles

By Emily Clark

18:04 February 19, 2008 PST

Digit Wireless, creator of Fastap keyboard technology, has now pioneered a Hindi Language Platform for mobile devices to meet the needs of a growing Indian technology consumer market. Research conducted in 2007 showed that India is the fastest growing global mobile market enjoying a growth rate of 316% from 2005–2010, with almost 240 million new connections. As such, it makes sense that companies such as Digit Wireless would want to cash in on this booming economy. Read More

The AHKY wrist worn translation device

By Mike Hanlon

July 16, 2007 Speaking via an interpreter is difficult enough at the best of times, so you can imagine the difficulties soldiers in foreign lands have communicating with the population when there is a significant language barrier, no interpreter and lots of big guns in the near vicinity. The AHKY (Arabic for ‘speak’ ) is a new wrist worn translation device developed by Iraqi-born University of Derby student, Amin Ismail, will soon tackle the problem when it is deployed by British troops serving in Iraq. The AHKY currently has ten phrases which have been programmed in English, Arabic and Kurdish. Phrases such as ‘nothing will happen to you’; ‘turn around slowly’; and ‘come here’. Other languages and phrases specific for a user’s specific mission are uploaded prior to each use. Read More

Celebrating 50 years of Fortran

By Mike Hanlon

June 21, 2007 The programming language Fortran celebrates its 50th anniversary this year, having touched the lives of millions of programmers and billions of people in the half century since. A proposal from IBM employee John Backus to develop an efficient alternative to assembly language for programming the company’s IBM 704 mainframe computer in 1953 resulted in the first specification for the IBM Mathematical FORmula TRANslating System in 1956. The first FORTRAN compiler appeared in April 1957 and the rest is history. To mark the occasion, a special issue of Scientific Programming on the role of Fortran in the scientific programming discipline is being published by IOS Press this month. The issue is dedicated to Fortran creator John Backus and Ken Kennedy, pioneer of Fortran compiler optimization and parallelization. Both highly esteemed scientists died earlier this year. Read More

Bilingual learning benefits second and third generation children

By Mike Hanlon

March 13, 2007 Bilingual learning can provide substantial benefits for second and third generation children whose families speak a language other than English, according to ESRC-funded research by Goldsmiths, University of London. Even when children have grown up with English as their stronger language, using both languages aids cognitive development and strengthens their identities as learners. Read More

US$230 Handheld Translator speaks 12 languages

By Mike Hanlon

January 12, 2007 The barriers between cultures that create fear, mistrust and conflict seem to be dissolving – first distance and now language is going the same way as the Berlin Wall. At CES, electronic handheld information publisher Franklin Electronic showed its new 12-Language Speaking Global Translator (Model TGA-490). The US$230 pocket-sized handheld contains over 450,000 words and 12,000 phrases in twelve languages and features recorded human speech providing accurate and clear pronunciation of words and phrases in all twelve languages. Basically, this means that if you speak Chinese (Mandarin), Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian or Spanish, you now have the basics to have a conversation with anyone who speaks one of these languages, though this communication tool was specially designed with the non-Asian language speaker travelling to the Far East in mind. The new PDA-sized device has a slide out keyboard and a rechargeable battery and also includes an MP3 player, a currency converter, world clock, alarm, and voice recorder. Read More

Breakthroughs In Cross Lingual Communication and Speech-to-Speech Translation

By Mike Hanlon

November 4, 2005 Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Karlsruhe's joint International Center for Advanced Communication Technologies (InterACT) held a landmark videoconference last week to demonstrate new breakthroughs in cross-lingual communication. InterACT director, computer science professor Alex Waibel, who is a faculty member at both institutions, demonstrateed domain-independent, speech-to-speech translation in a lecture, which was simultaneously translated from English to Spanish to German. Current speech-to-speech translation systems allow translation of spontaneous speech in very limited situations, like making hotel reservations or tourist shopping, but they cannot enable translation of large, open domains like lectures, television broadcasts, meetings or telephone conversations. The new technology developed by InterACT researchers fills that gap and makes it possible to extend such systems to other languages and lecture types. Read More

Computer program learns language rules and composes sentences, all without outside help

By Mike Hanlon

September 2, 2005 Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used to generate new and meaningful sentences. The method also works for such data as sheet music or protein sequences. The development -- which has a patent pending -- has implications for speech recognition and for other applications in natural language engineering, as well as for genomics and proteomics. It also offers new insights into language acquisition and psycholinguistics. Read More

Bilingual Baby Video Series

By Mike Hanlon

The most effective time to learn a language is between birth and age five - and that's the target age group of the Bilingual baby video series which covers most languages (Japanese, German, English etc) and uses an entirely immersive method of tuition where the language being taught is the only language used. Your child will only hear the language on the video. Foreign language words appear on screen to help readers and to reinforce what they see and hear. Small on-screen words appear in English so parents and older siblings can learn too! Read More